Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country

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Even when these stories have a basis in fact and history, there's often significant embellishment and fabrication before they catch on in our imagination, and teasing out these alterations is key to understanding how ghosts shape our relationship to the past. They cover up over the gaps and in the process help us assuage our anxieties, providing a rationale after the fact.

If you don’t like it, don’t eat it,” and everything would taste so delicious you’d go back for seconds or thirds? Paying attention not only to the true facts behind a ghost story, but also to the ways in which changes to those facts are made --and why those changes are made --Dickey paints a version of American history left out of the textbooks, one of things left undone, crimes left unsolved. Most of the essays in Ghostland don't focus on the truth of the alleged haunting unless it's relevant. With a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Southern California, he is an associate professor of creative writing at National University.Boston’s “ The Children of Green Knowe,” Susan Cooper’s “ The Dark Is Rising” and, two of my favorites, Alan Garner’s “ The Weirdstone of Brisingamen” and “ The Owl Service. with a Selected List of Sources and Index) by Edward Parnell has to be one of the most unusual and intriguing pieces of non-fiction related to weird fiction recently published. Dickey pops sensationalist bubbles by observing the underlying racism, sexism, and classism associated with many hauntings' long-told tales. Some have established reputations as "the most haunted mansion in America," or "the most haunted prison"; others, like the haunted Indian burial grounds in West Virginia, evoke memories from the past our collective nation tries to forget.

This book moves from the private space of the home to progressively more public spaces—from houses to businesses to civic spaces, and finally to whole cities. It is, in places, heart-breaking and it is an extraordinary achievement to have woven such sadness and loss into a tapestry of so many things that clearly bring the author (and, I suspect, much of his audience) joy. Their presence is the promise that we don’t have to say goodbye to our loved ones right away, and—is with Athendorous’s haunting—what was left undone in one’s life might yet be finished by one’s ghost. Dickey takes an erudite tour of haunted America and tells us repeatedly that the meaning of ghost stories lies not in what they claim about the occult but in what they inadvertently say about the anxieties and prejudices of the teller and the larger society . You won’t need an electronic device to capture the voices of the dead; a patient ear and an open mind will do.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. What he uncovers is so much more: our attitudes towards death, of course, but also gender norms, race, mental illness, and, surprisingly, architecture. In the months after her death, the house falls into the hands of a distant cousin; since by then most of the old merchant houses of lower Manhattan were gone, he decides to preserve the house as a museum, first opening it in 1936.

I found so many personal parallels in the book, so many shared or similar experiences, that it allowed me to re-assess my own experiences afresh.Finally, GHOSTLAND is a very personal memoir about dealing with and learning to cope with almost impossible painful, personal grief.